ROBERT STEELE: Quite fascinating and a marvelous graphic. What is missing from the entire “new” financial perspective is the combination of intelligence with integrity (decision-support that can be relied upon as truthful). True cost economics is something every consumer is going to want at the point of sale — red, yellow, green buttons for water, fuel, toxins, child labor, tax avoidance, regulatory failure. I certainly agree with other commentators that the “new” financial industry is far removed from where it needs to be on both transparency (to eradicate corruption) and encryption (to eradicate various other forms of evil). The day will come when payments are an information stream within a variety of melded information streams, the others being equally if not more important than payments — provenance and true cost information, assured anonymity, privacy, rights, and security another.

Here is just one graphic on the kind of truthful information that should be available at the point of sale — done right this will change markets overnight.

Click on Image to Enlarge

The original graphic also fails to reflect the disappearance of jobs and the urgency of arriving at new means of keeping economic innovation going by melding basic incomes, new forms of automated payment transaction taxes, and radical changes in how we self-insure.

In a sick sort of way, this is like Amazon selling books as objects without monetizing — or respecting the inherent value — of the integral information within each book and among books, and the value of the relations among individual authors, reviewers, and readers in time and space.

]]>http://www.phibetaiota.net/2015/08/graphic-future-finance-technology-not-transformative-at-all/feed/0Matt Taibbi: In the Age of Trump, Will Democrats Sell Out More, or Less?http://www.phibetaiota.net/2015/08/matt-taibbi-in-the-age-of-trump-will-democrats-sell-out-more-or-less/
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2015/08/matt-taibbi-in-the-age-of-trump-will-democrats-sell-out-more-or-less/#commentsSun, 02 Aug 2015 11:55:49 +0000http://www.phibetaiota.net/?p=113177

The collapse of the GOP gives the Democrats an opportunity to abandon “lesser evilism” — but they probably won’t

EXTRACT

The Democrats could take this godsend of a Trump situation and use it as an opportunity to finally have a healthy primary season debate about what they want to stand for in the future. But nah to that. They’ll probably just hoover donor cash and use press surrogates to bash progressives the way they always have. Trump or no Trump, if politicians don’t have to work for your vote, they won’t.

QUOTE (32): What has taken place over the last generation is a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government. Far from taking care of the rest of us, the financial leaders of America and their political servants have seemingly reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not work saving and have taken on a new mission that involved not creating wealth for us all, but simply absconding with whatever wealth remains in our hollowed out economy. They don’t feed us, we feed them.

The OTHER book I recommend to the readers of Rolling Stone is Theresa Amato (former aid to Ralph Nader), GRAND ILLUSION: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny. It was that book that gave me the courage to ignore all my whiney progressive friends that want to avoid calling a cesspool what it is — a cesspool, and start using the term.

Matt has it right: the Democratic Party and all its trappings, including the so-called progressive press, are morally and intellectually corrupt to the bone. They are incapable — at least for now — of realizing what Therea, Tom Steyer, myself, and others have realized in the past decade: I do not care what your issue is, from climate change to gay rights to the trivial legalization of marijuana to the more substantive need to cut all of the industrial complexes by two thirds or more, YOU WILL NOT GET AN HONEST HEARING IN A TWO PARTY TYRANNY.

An Electoral Reform Summit in September, and a nation-wide demand across No Party Preference (NPP), Independents and the six accredited small parties (I had to run for President in 2012 to learn we have EIGHT accredited parties, six of which are completely blocked from ballot access), for an Electoral Reform Act of 2015 to be passed by 4 November 2015, is within our power. It has eight points, just look up Open Power Electoral Reform and you will get right to it.

I have spent a couple of years trying to get Rolling Stone, Slate, AltNet, TruthOut, and others to focus on this, always being ignored to the point I have wondered if they are all funded by CIA and like Alex Jones and other hystericals, allowed to cover everything EXCEPT the ONE thing that could restore public power. This is a non-violent revolution waiting for the public to wake up and realize it has the power to change everything for the better overnight….and I cannot get anyone in the progressive press to notice.

Arrationality is an evolving term. It evolves specifically in reaction to rationality. Arrationality is as much a part of the 500-year process of welcoming science into our consciousness as anything else. In this sense, arrationality was how people thought before the early modern era began around 1500 – admittedly not always to the greatest effect.

Against all probability, a device that purports to use cold fusion to generate vast amounts of power has been verified by a panel of independent scientists. The research paper, which hasn’t yet undergone peer review, seems to confirm both the existence of cold fusion, and its potency: The cold fusion device being tested has roughly 10,000 times the energy density and 1,000 times the power density of gasoline. Even allowing for a massively conservative margin of error, the scientists say that the cold fusion device they tested is 10 times more powerful than gasoline — which is currently the best fuel readily available to mankind.

Phi Beta Iota: Microsoft probably uses the constant updates to do things other than update. They simply cannot be trusted anymore than Google. The global marketplace is waiting for a cloud convergence that provides absolute default security including at rest data encryption.

]]>http://www.phibetaiota.net/2015/08/arno-reuser-windows-10-spys-all/feed/0IVN: No Party Preference — and Not Voting: Latinos and Asian-Americanshttp://www.phibetaiota.net/2015/08/ivn-no-party-preference-and-not-voting-latinos-and-asian-americans/
http://www.phibetaiota.net/2015/08/ivn-no-party-preference-and-not-voting-latinos-and-asian-americans/#commentsSat, 01 Aug 2015 12:00:50 +0000http://www.phibetaiota.net/?p=113129Why Aren’t The Two Fastest Growing Demographics in Calif. Voting?

Only one in three eligible voters cast a ballot in the 2014 general election to elect all the statewide offices, congressional representatives and approve initiatives, a record low. But, for two of California’s fastest growing groups, the numbers are even more troubling.

These numbers are a problem because it shows just 17 percent of eligible Latinos and 18 percent of eligible Asian-Americans cast their ballots — less than one in five people eligible to vote did so.

Phi Beta Iota: Fully half of the eligible voters — 100 million — did not vote in 2012, a presidential election year. That is the democracy deficit that is growing. It is also the opportunity for any candidate able to lead a demand for electoral reform and a return to the process of all eligible voters.

Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday on the nationally syndicated radio show the Thom Hartmann Program that the United States is now an “oligarchy” in which “unlimited political bribery” has created “a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors.” Both Democrats and Republicans, Carter said, “look upon this unlimited money as a great benefit to themselves.”

“Political ground is gained not when you successfully inhabit the middle ground, but when you successfully impose your framing as the ‘common-sense’ position.”

George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working on moral frames for 50 years. He gives this precis: “Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic.”

Elsevier is one of the largest and most well-known scientific journal database, but it is also the most notorious for its expensive subscription fee and universities are getting tired of it. Univers reports that “Dutch Universities Start Their Elsevier Boycott.” The Netherlands, led by state secretary Sander Dekker, want all scientific content to be free online. In order to be published, the university or financier pays to be so. All content by Dutch scientists will hopefully be open access by 2024.

In the meantime, the Association of Universities in the Netherlands has asked all Dutch scientists that work with Elsevier to resign from their positions. As to be expected, some are willing and others are more reluctant. The goal is to pressure Elsevier to change its practices.

Phi Beta Iota: We are ten years from assuring that all minds have access to all information in all languages all the time. The value-added services will be in the post-processing and the human to human co-creation of new knowledge.

On Monday evening, the first residents of the Woodlands Acres Subdivision showed up at city offices with containers full of water and small red worms they say came out of their faucets, sprinklers and shower heads. Three days and dozens of reports later, Mayor Joe Landry said “people are not taking chances.”